


you end (and so do they)

by redlittleowl



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-31
Updated: 2017-01-31
Packaged: 2018-09-21 01:58:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9526832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redlittleowl/pseuds/redlittleowl
Summary: A Valentine's Day one-shot, written many years ago. Not very Valentine's Day-themed.





	

The rest of the world is celebrating a day of togetherness and love when he sees her for the first time.

That is not to say he notices her 

On the contrary, his eyes brush right through her as though she is not even there. It may be that she is not, but the catch in her empty chest is something new, startling enough to warrant a hitch of breath and the merest closing flutter of eyelids as a hand comes up to cradle the pain in her torso.

It is a long time later when she realizes that what she felt on that day of red and white and flower petals is what the day has always been about _—and that by seeing him on that day and her subconscious making the connection that she would never realize, at least not until it was too late—_ and that by waiting for him to come back to a ghost he may never have even saw, that she may have doomed herself to the worst kind of fate she never wanted.

* * *

 

He always wakes up alone, and this time is no different. Grey stone threatens to swallow him up and he sinks resignedly into the hollow that is his almost-self-imposed slavery.

No one questions when he makes his slow, steady way to the infirmary, and no one suspects when he slips the needle into the crook of his elbow as usual and administers his own life-saving drug. But he still feels the eyes on his back—not the heavy, oppressive pair of the man he is indebted to, or the detached, clinical pair of the teen who brews together the batches of medicine every six weeks, but a pair of shy, fearful, almost-not-there eyes that keeps their center of attention solely in between his shoulder blades.

He desperately wants to meet the owner of those eyes, but something inside is screaming at him that he lost that chance years ago, on a day when young couples new to love still believed in the innocence a single day could bring and celebrated with flowers and sweets.

Pain whistles through him as someone bumps into him by accident and the needle-point almost breaks off in his arm. He welcomes it, for at least it is a pain that he is familiar with. When he thinks of losing those eyes _(even though he knows that he already has, forever)_ , the pain that floods his chest with a cold certainty is one that he does not and perhaps cannot ever understand.

* * *

She is surrounded by ashes and blood, and her world is burning down to less than nothing. She screams, and no sound comes out.

He is gone.

She doesn’t know how she knows, doesn’t care about the ‘how’s or ‘why’s or ‘when’s. She sees him walking away, turning his back on her forever to pick up a small sweet and nibble experimentally at it moments before the world starts bleeding down around her. She had thought that he would have been the one to save her from watching this endless loop, this macabre death-show on infinite repeat.

She knows now she was mistaken, and in placing her hope in the wrong soul she has been irreversibly doomed. It is a mistake that is costing her everything, but

at the very end

she is glad she

* * *

He is glad he met her, he muses detachedly as he feels the life in him slowly bleed out, _even though a small, absurdly angry voice insists that he never really met her and that she was merely background at some commotion or other_. His vision begins to tunnel as a grey veil slowly descends over the world, and he reaches out to catch a falling rose petal in the palm of his hand.

It settles to rest on his outstretched palm, and the blood dripping from his fingers stains the white petal an irreparable rust color.

There is something important about red and white roses on a certain day. If only he could remember.


End file.
